The present invention relates generally to the transferring of data in a transmission system. More particularly, the present invention relates to the use of time-frequency (TF) slicing for use in transmitting data in a data transmission system.
High-definition television (HDTV) services generally require higher bit rates than conventional standard definition television (SDTV) services. Proposed digital video broadcasting standardization seeks to design the physical layer of new terrestrial system for broadcasting of HDTV services. Time-Frequency (TF) slicing is one candidate to the baseline of such standardization work due to its property of providing high statistical multiplexing gain compared to single radio-frequency (RF) channel multiplexes, where a lot of capacity would be wasted, when transmitting high bit rate (e.g., 4-16 Mbps) services. Due to regulatory constraints, it is not possible to increase the bandwidth of one RF channel. TF slicing solves the problem by combining several RF channels into one multiplex.
However, receivers for such broadcast should have only one tuner to receive all parts of a service which requires intelligent scheduling of the services transmitted over many radio channels. In current digital TV systems many TV channels might share a service part, e.g. teletext or Multimedia Home Platform (MHP). With TF-slicing scheduling of the service parts becomes a problem, if simultaneous reception of e.g. a TV service and a common service part with one tuner should be enabled.